A drug addict publicly threatened to kill me. In his drug-addled mind, he had created a false memory that his wife had cheated on him by having an affair with me. For him, the invented memory was real. I took his threat seriously.
I was the pastor of a nondenominational Christian church that my wife and I had helped start in La Paz, Baja California Sur, Mexico. Along with all the typical “Christiany” type activities, our church was involved in environmental care ministries using SCUBA and sea kayaks, addiction ministries, and we also ran a secret, off-the-record safe house where we hid and cared for severely abused women and children. Because our church cared about the messy things in life, the church was, at times, let’s say, messy.
The drug addict in this story had, on many occasions, abused his wife. On one occasion he threatened to bludgeon her to death with a hammer and then cut her into small pieces and distribute them around the city. The young daughters would call us, crying for help, and on several occasions, we rushed to intervene. While the man never hit me, we did get into a shoving match at the church one night. The wife called the police, who, of course, did absolutely nothing.
On one occasion, the husband chained the doors to their house shut, trapping his wife and two daughters inside. He had cut the telephone landline, taken his wife’s phone, but forgotten that one of his daughters also had a phone. The young girl called, pleading for help. Another Christian man and I went to the house with bolt cutters, freed the woman and her two daughters, and whisked them away to the secret safe house.
It was around this time that the man threatened to kill me.
My office at the church was in an enclosed area and offered no easy escape should the man come after me. He could easily have trapped me inside. To minimize the risk, we wheeled my desk out to the middle of the sanctuary after stacking all the chairs around the edges of the room. This gave me the ability to see anyone approaching from the front door and provided a chance to run or defend myself with the pepper spray I kept within reach beside my computer.
One Monday morning, I was working away at my computer when a young, obviously terrified woman and a little girl walked into the church. The woman asked if we were the church that helped abused women fleeing violent and abusive partners. I assured her that we were.
She began to tell me the story of abuse and horror in which she had been living. She explained that the suitcase she was carrying belonged to her husband and that it was full of money, a lot of money, which she had stolen in her desperate dash for freedom. I told her that we would hide her, but that she had to return the money. We made arrangements to secretly return it through her mother-in-law.
While I was talking with the woman, another man, whom we could only describe as insane, walked into the church. His name was Fernondo (yes, that is how he spelled his name). He spent a lot of time at the church. We fed him, gave him clothes, and occasionally let him shower in the church bathroom.
He was a friendly guy and often sat in on our church leadership meetings. We would ask his opinion on various matters and always received the same enthusiastic answer:
“Yes, brother!”
He would emphasize his agreement by pounding the floor with his dog-deterring walking stick.
That morning Fernondo asked if he could preach. I said, “Sure, go ahead.”
The only people in the church were Fernondo, the battered woman, her daughter, and me. He launched into a fiery sermon about lesbians in hell.
While he preached, another man staggered through the open church doors. Our doors were always open whenever someone was present in the building. The man was as drunk as could be. He knelt on the floor, said he was hungry, made the sign of the cross, and then passed out cold, face-first onto the concrete floor.
At that moment, my wife walked into the building. From where she stood, all she could see was a body lying in the middle of the floor. Because of the person’s bushy hairstyle, she initially thought it was one of the church’s co-leaders. As she walked farther into the building, she found me talking with the abused woman, saw Fernondo enthusiastically preaching away, and noticed the unconscious drunk lying on the floor.
It turned out to be just one more day in the life of La Paz de Cristo Church.
The best compliment ever paid to my ministry came when my supervisor remarked that never in his life had he seen so many messed-up people gathered in one place as he had in our church. Personally, I think that if Jesus had ever started a church, it would have included a lot of misfits and former misfits getting their lives together as they learned to follow hm.
I am no longer the pastor of that church. That ministry is now in the very capable hands of another servant of God. I am off starting another church, a less formal church, something many people would call a house church.
Even though the structures, plans, and programs are far less formal than those of the previous churches we have helped launch, the goal remains unchanged. We want to make Jesus known by demonstrating what it means to be His followers. We want to people to look at us but see Jesus.
To do this requires an outside-the-church way of living. To do this requires us to view the church as the tool, not the goal. To do this requires us to love people who are anything but lovable. To do this means we must love people the way Jesus does. Thinking this way makes life messy, very messy. Our ministry is messy not because we are still messy, but because we love and serve those who are. We simply know that we are forgiven, not better.
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My wife and I are starting a new church, a house church. We attempt to fulfill all the Biblical requirements for what the church is. I suspect we fall short of some of the extra Biblical and traditional church practices. The new group is called the Patio because it meets in the front yard patio of our house. Our focus is on the three Cs – Christ, Community and Consistency.
